Falls

If I could sleep, she jabs back at him as if he were a predator she needed to distance herself from. As if he had come upon her with his teeth bared to drive her back to the Cove, instead of as a fellow night owl. Amused by her tenacity, he chuckles low in his throat, pressing his lips together to muffle the sound.

The frequency with which he found himself in the company of fierce mares, rather than those that were docile or yielding, should surprise him, but it does not. Solomon had long ago accepted that the fates preferred to see him struggle in uphill battles to earn respect, rather than to see him charm the young and naive. These days, he almost preferred the challenge. There was something honorable about earning the respect of fierce women like Valka or Xiomara that he simply could not find elsewhere.

"I suppose I am," he echoes with a lop-sided grin as she accepts his presence with reluctance. A beat passes before she turns her face upward, and he traces his gaze up the slope of her neck upward, past her tightly-clenched jaw, and lifts his eyes to the stars as well. Solomon had never ascribed any special meaning to the glimmering lights, but he often found himself wakeful beneath their soft glow. There was a peace in the nighttime that did not exist during the day. A quiet that was swallowed by the world, drowned out by the cacophony of lives being lived.

His gaze drops back to her as she explains, wondering if her question hinted at some non-obvious malady, only to catch the softening of her features. Relieved at the small sign that she was not prickly all the way through, he nodded thoughtfully but did not speak for a moment.

"It's easier for me to think about the hard things at night, like somehow the world isn't as loud." The words, when they finally come, are far more honest than he meant them to be and his gaze ducks away from hers for a moment to study the trees that surround them. His tail flicks at his hinds again when he turns back, his lop-sided grin reappearing.

"I'm Solomon, from the Cove." He says, as if changing topics will allow them both to skirt past their moments of vulnerability as though they hadn't happened. It seems wrong to announce his title here, in the intimacy of this moment, and so he leaves it off. Sometimes announcing himself as King had advantages, such as when dealing with the traitorous Paradisian King, but mostly, it felt like a handicap. Giving it away in introductions always made it seem as though he were trying too hard to be impressive, which almost always resulted in more scrutiny than he would have faced otherwise. Turning his green gaze back to hers, he gestures subtly toward her as if to invite her to introduce herself. "Are you from these islands, star watcher?"

Solomon